All-Nighters

Before we begin, if you're religious, say a prayer for those affected by what happened at the Boston Marathon today. I don't know anyone personally who was there (I don't believe so, at least), but one of my students did have an uncle who ran the marathon today. (The uncle is fine - my resident said his uncle finished the race 30 minutes before the explosions occurred so he was not in danger.) I really hope they figure out who was behind it and why. Learning about this situation and knowing that I was in Missouri with no role to play outside of "observer" made me align with one of today's holidays - "That Sucks Day". I'm sure that holiday was created with taxes in mind, but still.

One of today's holidays was McDonald's Day, so that is where I got my lunch. It was okay, but I definitely appreciate that I'm not compelled to eat fast food all the time. My dinner was the leftover fish, carrots, and chocolate mashed potatoes from Saturday, which I hope offset the unhealthiness of lunch.

The more exciting holiday was "Take a Wild Guess Day". After some contemplation, I want to get the students involved in these holidays, since the random days have been coming up more in conversation. "How can I celebrate making wild guesses on something?" I thought. It hit me - a guessing game! Since I have to verify every guy is on floor after the nightly curfew, I could get everyone involved in the festivities. As I did room checks, I carried around my giant clear mug filled with M&M's and asked people to guess how many were inside. A handful of people were already asleep, but everyone else had a go. Some people were methodical, trying to count a cross-section and then go down the mug, while others were truly embracing the holiday and blurting out a random number. The numbers went to the extremes of 7 and 1,600, although most fell in the 200-500 range. There ended up being 622 M&M's in the mug and a student actually guessed 623! Another student tried to cry foul, citing Price is Right rules (in jest), but I couldn't ignore the fact that a student was so close, whereas second and third place were 660 and 588. I ended up giving the winner the M&M's and a noise silly putty I randomly had in my apartment. Definitely a nice way to spice up room checks.

With the end of the semester starting to loom its head over campus, I wanted to briefly talk about all-nighters. So, the students move to the Academy and live on a college campus, surrounded by friends, with no parents to force them to go to bed. My co-workers and I can tell students to go to bed, but we aren't going to do mandatory bed checks and if a student wants to read a book or watch a movie, we have no way of knowing. It's no surprise that we commonly hear of students staying up all night to play games or hang out with friends, particularly on the weekends. To be honest, I had a couple of all-nighters in my undergrad experience. I do use the word 'couple' literally, because I can only remember two nights where I just didn't sleep. Oddly enough, the nights were very similar to each other - a friend on the floor would bring his N64 to my room and we would stay up playing old school games. (One that really sticks out in the FPS mini-game in Banjo & Kazooie.) It was certainly a fun experience, but as the sun rose, I knew that the next day would be a long one.

On the flip-side, I can't say that I remember pulling all-nighters for academics, but I certainly pulled some late nights. There were many nights my senior year when I would be up in the wee hours, trying to chip away at the math homework, and call it quits when it felt like my frustration and lack of sleep weren't worth the couple of percentage points the homework had to offer. Since I felt the need to complete the homework, those nights felt much more forced and were anything from fun. The self-frustration has also been re-created here as those administrative deadlines bang on my door.

I think the thing that gets me about the students' late-night antics is how often it occurs. As I said before, I'm pretty sure I only pulled off all-nighters with friends a couple of times, yet people here are up to the same schedule every weekend. At the risk of being labelled a hypocrite, tonight is another night where I'm up notably late past my bedtime. I closed my door at midnight and since the day felt work-ish, I wanted to take a little more time to relax before writing. Here's the kicker - my first appointment is 1pm tomorrow. There are many days where I legitimately don't have to do anything before 4pm. In contrast, the students have classes at 10am, 9am, or even 8am, and they are going on very little sleep during the week! It's very common to hear "oh, I'll just catch up on the weekend", but I just want to pull out a scientific study and say "no, that's how your body works!".

One reason I was thinking about all-nighters was that I contemplated doing one tonight. Parts of my apartment feel like paper heaps and since it hindered my ability to do some work this afternoon, I was sick of it and wanted to change it. After mulling over the idea, though, I settled into the answer that an all-nighter would be silly. Yes, I'm off on Wednesday so I could catch up on sleep then, but I'm trying to get a more regular schedule going, not throw more wrenches at the stove. (I don't know if that's an actual phrase, but... yeah.) Also, Tuesdays are naturally busy, so a Tuesday with no sleep would not be fun, especially when I need to be attentive at my different appointments.

I think I'm going to chalk this up to knowing my personal limitations and the pearl of wisdom I've developed over the years: "sleep is awesome". The students are still figuring that one out and I hope they do it some time relatively soon. It can be irritating to be an observer, but the lesson will be best learned by experiencing it, as opposed to simply hearing it. Falling in line with this chain of logic, I want to experience sleep rather than simply writing about it. Have a great night!